Borderlands

1 Strange Planet Red snow. It stains the virgin purity of sterile Antarctica: a pinprick of the peculiar in the howling fastness. Red spots, like blood drip-dripping from a blank-faced statue of the Virgin to speckle the freshly laundered crispness of an altar cloth. An alien redness in the whitest world--something that doesn't belong. For a while, when the first explorers reached the fringes of the southern polar regions, the patches of red snow they found along the edges of the continent remained a minor mystery. Then the mystery was solved. The Antarctic whiteness had been stained by penguin droppings, colored red by the shellfish that the birds had eaten. Nothing strange about the redness now. Except that it appeared elsewhere. In the province of Macerata, Italy, at the end of the last century, a myriad small, blood-colored clouds blew over, covering the sky. When the storm broke, those clouds dumped a hundred-thousand seeds upon the ground--seeds that came from a tree found only in central Africa and the Caribbean. In dusty Baghdad, on the night of 20 May 1857, a heavy darkness fell, succeeded after midnight by a red and lurid gloom. As panic seized the inhabitants, a dense shower of sand began to rain upon the city. More redness fell upon the little town of Stroud in Gloucestershire on 24 October 1987, this time in the shape of hundreds of thumbnail-sized, rose-colored frogs, which tumbled from the sky, bouncing off umbrellas and pavements amid townspeople going about their business. Three red things, all coming from the sky. Such patterns may be found wherever unexplained phenomena occur, combining, piece by piece, to form the fragmentary portrait of a truly colorful world, haunted by aliens and fairies, miracles and wonders, monsters and ghosts, all the way from Alaska to Argentina and from Britain to Japan. We can explore this strange planet in many ways: by continent, listing the phenomena of each country, dating and placing them, and feeding the information into a computer that might confirm that ghosts appear near running water, and that odd things tend to happen on Wednesdays; by category, concentrating first on monsters, then on ghosts and, finally, on possible connections between the two; or by color, in the hope that this unorthodox approach may yield unexpected insights. Choose another color. Yellow: a yellow rain fell in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Some feared it was a Russian chemical warfare agent, but it was later positively identified as a blizzard of dung from a million bees. Green: a disc-shaped UFO glowed green as it hovered over a weapons depot near Astrakhan on the night of 28 July 1989, watched by servicemen from two army units in the area. Blue: thirteen-year-old Jean Bernard saw the Virgin Mary in the village of Vallensanges, near St. Etienne in France, on 19 July 1888. She wore a white dress and a blue cloak spangled with stars, and encouraged him to kill a lizard. Silver: the color of the Big Muddy Monster, an eight-foot-tall ape-creature that haunted Murphysboro, Illinois, between 1972 and 1988. Two men saw it at about one-thirty a.m. one night, moving through the rustling treeline at the edge of a salvage yard full of decaying cars and angled shadows. It had glowing red eyes and yellow teeth, and smelled of sewers and skunk. Choose another continent--it makes no difference. From a vision of the Virgin in a Patagonian bedroom to an encounter with the devil in an Irish pub; from the great sea serpent of the North Atlantic to giant wheels of phosphorescent light spinning slowly beneath the tranquil waters of the Persian Gulf; from the ghost riders of the Mesopotamian desert to Christ's grave--in Japan; from the planetary bar code stretching hundreds of miles across the Australian wilderness to the poltergeist-haunted toilet of a German dentist, Dr. BachsDash, Mike is the author of 'Borderlands ' with ISBN 9780440614166 and ISBN 0440614163.